This little museum hut is all that remains of Kruger National Park’s erstwhile Rabelais Rest Camp, long since abandoned when the Parks’ central-western boundary was moved to its present position at the Orpen Rest Camp & Entrance Gate.
“Abandoned” is the theme for WordPress’ weekly photo challenge.
We spent the better part of today exploring the Blyde River Canyon Nature Reserve around Swadini, and came across this beautifully reflective pool along one of the walking trails.
Tomorrow we’re heading back home to Pretoria after nine days exploring the north-east corner of South Africa. We plan to publish several posts about the places we visited in the coming weeks and hope we’ll see you around de Wets Wild again soon!
We spent another day on the Kruger National Park today, entering for a day visit through the Orpen Gate.
Only a few kilometers into the Park, we met with the King and Queen of the Beasts on their honeymoon…
“Threes” is the theme for this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge
We visited the Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre today, very near the Swadini resort where we are staying. They offer a guided tour of their facilities, enabling close-up encounters with a variety of raptors, predators and other wildlife.
Visit their website to learn about the wonderful work they do to assist orphaned, injured and poisoned wildlife, and, if you are ever in the vicinity, we can highly recommend the experience.
From Pafuri, we travelled southwards towards the central section of the Kruger National Park, spending two nights at peaceful Letaba Rest Camp and exploring the mopane country between the Letaba and Olifants Rivers.
We had some great sightings – including wild dogs! – and will share some more photos from our visit to Letaba in an upcoming installment of de Wets Wild.
We spent our Valentine’s Weekend at the rustic but very romantic Pafuri Rivercamp, in the extreme north-east of South Africa’s Limpopo Province.
We’ll share more about our travels in the Pafuri region of the Kruger National Park soon, but for a teaser have a look at our entry into the “Treasure” photo challenge.
We’ve just spent three days exploring the beautiful Pafuri region of the Kruger National Park. Unspoiled and remote, Pafuri is true wilderness.
Heaven!
We post these pictures in response to WordPress’ weekly photo challenge theme “Treasure” and will soon publish more from our trip, showcasing all that Pafuri has to offer.
We (the Wild de Wets), posing for a portrait, at Glen Reenen Rest Camp in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park
“Selfie” is the theme for this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge
Boxing Day 2013 saw us heading back to one of our favourite South African wild places – the spectacular Golden Gate Highlands National Park in the eastern Free State Province.
We had three nights booked at Glen Reenen Rest Camp. Our unit offered a beautiful view of the mountains surrounding us, and the camp is frequented by a wide variety of birds and animals. Sitting on the verandah we were surrounded by paradise.
Difficult as it was to wrestle ourselves away from Glen Reenen’s peaceful surroundings, we made the most of all the activities available (when the weather allowed). Driving around, horse-riding or hiking – take your pick!
Thanks to the good rainfall all the streams in the park were flowing strongly.
A visit to a National Park would not be the same without the animals and birds that find sanctuary there! Our most special sighting of this trip? Two specimens of the rare bearded vulture passing overhead!
We also posted a couple of pictures while we were in the Park. On the 26th of December a thunderstorm welcomed us back to the Park, on the 27th we chased the end of the rainbow and on the 28th we marveled at the cloud formations passing overhead.
Our regular readers will know that Golden Gate Highlands National Park has a very special place in our hearts. If you’d like to know more about this beautiful place, have a look at the special post we published on the occasion of the Park’s 50th birthday.
After leaving Ithala Game Reserve (read here for more about Ithala and Ntshondwe Resort) our next December holiday destination was the wilds of the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park and our much loved Mpila Camp.
We love Hluhluwe-Imfolozi because of its wilderness atmosphere (the Park covers almost a thousand square kilometres), its fascinating history and the enormous contribution it has made to the conservation successes of our country. We love Mpila most because of its unspoiled character. The camp is not fenced (except for a single strand of electrical wiring supposed to keep the elephants out – they come into camp and destroy the water pipes looking for a drink) and a wide variety of animals, including predators from time to time, move freely among the accommodation units. Surrounding the camp, the Imfolozi-section of the Park offers some of the best game viewing available in South Africa, and there’s few game-viewing roads as rewarding as the Sontuli Loop, just half-an-hour’s leisurely drive from camp.
December is one of the wetter months in this part of the country and by the time we arrived in the Park the vegetation was lush and green and the waterholes, streams and rivers filled to capacity. What a contrast to the huge swathes of veld burnt to ashes just prior to our visit last year and yet again we were amazed at nature’s resilience.
Of course, Hluhluwe-Imfolozi is known as a Big-5 reserve and within 24 hours of our arrival we were rewarded with excellent sightings of all these sought-after animals: elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion and leopard.
The Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park is world renowned as the place where the Southern White Rhinoceros was rescued from the brink of extinction in the middle of the previous century. Today the reserve is home to a substantial number of white and black rhinos – let’s hope that the current tide of poaching can be halted before we find ourselves that close to losing these enigmatic animals again…
Elephants were shot out of the area by hunters before the Park’s proclamation in 1895, and were reintroduced to the Park in the 1980’s. Today, the park boasts a healthy population of 550 of these majestic animals. We had wonderful encounters with several mature bulls, but our most memorable sighting was of a very large herd of cows and calves of all ages crossing the Imfolozi River.
Hluhluwe-Imfolozi protects the second biggest population of Cape Buffalo in South Africa – almost 5,000 – and we regularly encountered these apparently placid but actually extremely dangerous animals on our drives through the reserve.
The lion is another species that was hunted to local extinction before the reserve came into being, but unlike the elephant they made their own way back to the reserve in the 1960’s (well, just one male, probably from Mozambique, which was later joined by a pride of females translocated by the reserve management) and today there’s about 200 lions in the Park.
The Park is estimated to be home to only about 80 leopards and, given their secretive nature, any encounter should be considered extremely fortunate. We were very happy to spot a female at the bridge over the Imfolozi River early one morning – only our second ever sighting of leopard in the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park.
The Park is also home to three other big African predators. On this visit we missed out on seeing the African Wild Dogs and Cheetahs, but we did get to see Spotted Hyenas a couple of times
As magnificent as the “Big Five” and large predators are, there’s so much more to enjoy when visiting Hluhluwe-Imfolozi. The Park harbours thousands upon thousands of primates, antelope, zebra, warthog and giraffe, and a multitude of birds and reptiles.
You’ll easily imagine how sad we were when our four nights at Mpila and in the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park came to an end – seemed it was over in the blink of an eye. Hluhluwe-Imfolozi is one of South Africa’s genuine wildlife treasures and we’re already planning our next visit there.
From Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park we headed back home to Pretoria to enjoy Christmas with the extended family before heading to Golden Gate Highlands National Park (yes, again! And we’ll be posting photographs from that trip soon 😉 )
DeWetsWild 